Fourteen years for her, one weekend for me, and eighteen bad months

Fourteen years against one weekend is what we started with. She had been doing this since her twenties. I had been to one thing, with a friend, having thought about it for a decade and acted on none of it. We got together anyway and the first eighteen months were considerably harder than either of us admitted at the time.

We are thirty three and forty seven, out in the 905, together two years. The problem was never that she knew more. It was that neither of us noticed how quickly every evening turned into her running something and me being brought along, or how far that spread into parts of our life that have nothing to do with rope. By the end of the first year I was deferring to her about restaurants.

We handled it badly to begin with. I went quiet, she got frustrated, and we both told ourselves it was about something else entirely. What eventually worked was blunt and slightly humiliating: we said out loud what was happening, and then we deliberately kept the learning and the relationship in separate rooms for a while.

We are posting because we would like to know a couple who have been through the same start. Specifically we want to know whether it evens out or whether you simply build around it. We have plenty of opinions and very little perspective, being two years in and talking mostly to each other.